The pattern is repeating across the world, but there may be many local variances from one place to the next. A survey conducted by the Digital Education Council reported that around 3,840 students engaged in their studies using AI tools; 86% of those students reported using at least one AI tool.
In the UK, that number shot up from 66% in 2024 to 92% by 2025. A separate survey of UK undergraduate students indicated that 94% of them had used AI tools in some way to assist with their assessed work in 2022, which greatly surpasses the 80% use reported by Australian undergraduate students.
The enforcement end of this story also has a unique set of headlines, with Scottish regulators catching more than 1,000 students caught cheating with the use of AI; that represents a 700% increase from what had been previously recorded.
In Canada, the same trend exists but from a different view. A KPMG survey sample of more than 400 Canadian students indicated that approximately 60% of them had utilized AI tools in doing their assignments, evidence of a broader increase in the use of AI on campuses across North America.
Australia presents the sharpest picture of scale against institutional pressure. A survey conducted at four universities – The University of Queensland, Deakin University, Monash University, and the University of Technology Sydney – included more than 8,000 students, and showed nearly 83% of those students used AI tools in relation to their studies, of which nearly 44% reported they did so daily or at least once a week; almost 40% of respondents indicated that they utilized AI tools incorrectly on assessment items, and nearly 71% of participants indicated they believe that AI tools make it easier to cheat.
There has been a visible uptick since 2023 in misconduct cases at the University of Newcastle, where they went from 816 cases in 2023 to 1,220 cases in 2024, with 342 of those cases happening just in the first six months of 2025.
Cases at the University of New South Wales followed suit, climbing 43% in only one year. At the Australian Catholic University, nearly 6,000 instances of AI cheating were logged in 2024 alone, which was approximately 90% of all academic integrity violations.
However, almost 25% of those instances were dismissed after investigation, which led AU to drop the AI detection services via Turnitin in March 2025.
In contrast, high stakes examinations within a culture of high-flakes tests is shaping South Korea’s experience. Cheating was reported at the or under graduate level at Korea University as part of a large open on-line class with over 1,400 total enrolled students, which led officials to explore nullifying the results of the test; they are also building a plan to incorporate AI based courses into all schools in S. Korea by the year 2025— simultaneously failing to monitor their own students.
Detection systems from Canada to Australia are being stretched by the same pressures. The University of Cape Town will discontinue use of Turnitin’s AI Score on or after October 1st, 2025 based upon evidence that the AI score generation and detection tool is neither reliable nor valid for use in measuring student learning, joining universities in Australia that also will stop using AI detection altogether.
Cross-country comparison tells the story of how uneven countries are: In a study comparing seven countries, AI generated academic work was most prevalent in Australia (31%) and the United Kingdom had the overall highest incidence of plagiarism (33%); and S. Africa has the lowest incidence of plagiarism (13%) and the second highest AI incidence in academic work (26%).
Countries have stark differences with respecter to exam culture, enforcement desire, and awareness of student and university usage of AI but they all share the same formula for determining how incidence of AI has happened- the formula is ( access to students + pressure to succeed + clarity about the academic integrity standard— then the outcome is the same regardless of where you measure IV and DV.
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